"And every glittering kiss and every touch of flesh is another shard of heart you’ll never see again.”
Once Isra thought of skin as something golden to be shed. She thought of it as a cage, a thing to be rattled and whipped but never cracked open. Skin, she used to believe, was for lash, steel and blood. Everything she was stayed protected under that bleeding cage. And down beneath the nerves, and marrow, and teeth, she stayed hidden like a light trapped in the blackness (flicking, flickering, faintly).
But now, with the lash of animal teeth (and animal magic, and animal need) she does not think she wants to shed this skin of scale and dirt. Now it feels like steel is cutting away all the boundaries of her body and her blood is rushing through her like a tsunami instead of like small, forest creeks. Now it feels like skin is not a thing to shed.
Skin is a thing made to burn.
Each touch of his teeth feels like a track of oil painted across her in furious, looping swirls of need. Eik is painting, and tasting, and consuming. Isra is burning, and smoldering, and exploding. They are animals and the world is their forest, and their beach, and their endless sky. She has never felt more feral, or more like a thing too heavy for mortality to hold, when she drags her horn across his cheek and begs in violence.
The world around them, the shadow thick enough to choke on, turns to gold and diamond-dust and flowers catching the darkness like newborn glass. Isra is helpless against the tide of her power rushing out in waves from the burning wreckage of her skin. It's all she can do to hold together what soft pieces of her are left in the onslaught of all this animal want.
Eik pulls her along like a wolf and she follows like a lioness. Isra is all teeth, and roar, and endless hunger.
And in the dark, like a lioness gnawing on a bone, Isra discovers the true purpose of skin.
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